By the time you read this, your movie-loving Webb writer will have kicked off his second course in Film Studies at Lycoming College.
Last year, it was “Movie Masterpieces” — with such classics as Singin’ in the Rain, Sunrise, Life Is Beautiful and Some Like It Hot.
For fall ’26, we chose to offer “Grit, Gold and Glory: Hollywood’s American West” — perhaps a tough sell for Gen Z college kids.
And so, while the class covers such genre giants as High Noon, True Grit and The Searchers, it also includes revisionist and neo-Westerns like Unforgiven, John Sayles’ Lone Star and one choice from Quentin Tarantino (haven’t yet decided between Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight).
And to further foster engagement, I’ll start the course off with a film that is fresh and recent — yet also chock-full of standard Western tropes: rugged desert landscapes; a damsel in distress; a town held captive by brutal baddies; and of course, a climactic shootout.
That would be 2008’s dandy Appaloosa — starring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger and Jeremy Irons.
But this is Harris’ baby.
Working from a novel by Robert B. Parker (best known for the Spenser detective series), Harris not only helped pen the screenplay, but also produced and directed; he even co-wrote and sang a fairly effective song that runs during the closing credits.
The story involves a hard-headed traveling gunman and his partner who are hired to free the title town from a vicious gang — and what happens when an attractive woman gets into the mix.
And here again, Appaloosa picks up one of the Western’s most common threads: the alternately volatile and beneficent influence of women on the frontier — and, relatedly, how the killing lifestyle of a good lawman tends to conflict with the very civilized society he’s made possible.
Appaloosa also triumphs in its terrific Jeff Beal score, and in painstakingly authentic production design: wrinkled and disfigured window glass; a misspelled store sign; and fantastic work with an antique train (the credits list a welder hired just for that).
Western fans shouldn’t miss this one.
Now for the second entry on my 12-title syllabus, I’d originally slated the 1939 classic Stagecoach, bringing together — for the first of 14 pairings — the two men most closely associated with the American Western: John Wayne and director John Ford.
But I already had one Wayne-Ford piece on the roster — 1959’s The Searchers, generally considered the greatest Western ever made — plus one other title for both Wayne (Rio Bravo) and Ford; the latter’s 1946 charmer, My Darling Clementine, is a genuine masterpiece of the genre.
Going with Clementine instead of Stagecoach gives students a chance to see Henry Fonda at his finest; it also allows us to cover the genre’s most famous gunfight: the one at the O.K. Corral. That has been the subject of at least a dozen screen adaptations, including 1993’s beloved Tombstone, and even one episode of the original Star Trek.
Fonda is a wonder as Marshal Wyatt Earp, here playing the legendary lawman as modest and soft-spoken — though still mighty handy with a handgun.
Clementine also stars Victor Mature as the ailing Doc Holliday, along with Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan and Ward Bond, who made nearly twice as many movies with Ford as Wayne did. (You’ll recognize him as the cop from It’s a Wonderful Life.)
Filmed in luscious black-and-white, the classic Western frontlines Ford’s beloved Monument Valley, and even manages a thematically relevant recitation of “To be or not to be,” from Hamlet.
On top of all that, the film is currently available free on YouTube.
Now I’ll tell ya, pardner — I had hoped to cover roughly half my course selections with this first in a short Webb series on Westerns; but the other movies will have to wait till later.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: If you have a favorite Western to recommend, shoot me a message: robbwhitefan@gmail.com.
